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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On his culture blog, Brian Micklethwait provides a reference to a preview of an American television program about the reactions of the muslim world to a perceived onslaught of American television and movies, and how they are perceived by many as “overt propaganda created to undermine their religious and cultural identity”, and yet that at the same time, people love to watch them.
Brian has some has some wise thoughts on the subject himself, and concludes by observing that inevitably the culture must move in two directions.
But all will eventually be well. They’ll make their own shows, that satisfy their young, but deflect the complaints of the complainers.
And then we’ll watch their shows too.
This all invites questions about just how cultural programming – television and movies – propagates around the modern globalised world, which is ultimately much more interesting than simply “America is trying to dominate the world with its propaganda”. It’s both simpler and much more complex. For one thing, American programs are not meant as overt propaganda, and they are certainly not aimed at the Muslim world. Hollywood is trying to make money, and that is all. The Muslim world is such a small market that Hollywood is essentially not paying attention at all, and this is even more so in the case of television than in the case of movies.
For there is a huge difference in the overseas reception of American television and American movies. American movies dominate the box office everywhere pretty much without exception. Local movies have a much smaller market share than American movies virtually everywhere, and Hollywood is selling the same movies to the entire world. Hollywood movies today make more money outside the US than they do inside the US (almost all of which comes from Europe and East Asia), so Hollywood is very conscious of what foreign audiences will want to see when making movies. Often this leads to what may be described as “lowest common denominator” film-making. Movies containing lots of explosions are popular everywhere. (Comedies travel far less well, which is why Hollywood makes fewer of them than it used to, and is why they have smaller budgets). However, rather than turning movies into “overt propaganda”, this tends to make movies bland. American film production does interact with the rest of the world, but in a slightly less direct way. Hollywood has a ferocious appetite for talent. Anything good that is done by filmmakers in the rest of the world tends to get co-opted by Hollywood. If audiences like Hong Kong style action sequences, then these will find their way into American film. The people making the films in America will often be the same people who made the ones in Hong Kong, working in Los Angeles and being paid far more (and working shorter hours) than was ever the case on the other side of the Pacific. When a film financed by a Hollywood studio but made by a Hong Kong filmmaker and filmed in Canada is shown in Spain, it’s a bit hard to tell just whose culture is being influenced by what. (I will be intrigued to see what happens when Iran becomes less oppressive, and some of the country’s many talented film-makers get the opportunity to make films in Hollywood. The thing stopping this is the political situation in Iran and certainly not that in Hollywood.)
The propagation of American television is totally different, although the final conclusion is perhaps the same. → Continue reading: Movies, Television, and Globalisation
Least you think all we talk about is politics here on Samizdata.net. I just got through watching a DVD of Dog Soldiers and it is proof positive that you do not need a famous cast of ‘Big Names’ or vast budget for special effects to make a rather good horror B-movie.
The script will not win any awards for originality but as anyone who knows British squaddies could tell you, the characters are well presented and credible: the slang and comportment are perfect. Also they react as one might expect when suddenly confronted with a seemingly unbelievable yet manifestly undeniable situation… which is to say they do not (initially) believe that they are being stalked by honest-to-goodness werewolves, but they do not deny the obvious either when they find themselves wading through gore and intestines.
Excellent stuff… if you are a connoisseur of B-movies, then your hard earned pounds/bucks/€uros could be far worse spent than renting or purchasing this dirty little gem of a movie. I have seen flicks ten times worse than this which cost one hundred times more to make.
Waahhhoooooooooooooooo!
Cloning is an understandably controversial subject, and it would appear that all the excitement about cloning humans may have been somewhat premature. But this sounds like a potentially most entertaining application of the principle:
After a six-year search Japanese scientists are preparing to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths from frozen DNA samples found in Siberia.
Inspired by Dolly the sheep – cloned from the cell of an adult ewe in Scotland in 1996 – and the film Jurassic Park, researchers from Kagoshima and Kinki universities and the Gifu Science and Technology Centre began the search in 1997 for sperm or tissue from mammoths preserved in the tundra.
The plan was to find a frozen male, recover samples of its sperm, inseminate a modern elephant and create a mammoth-elephant hybrid. No sperm was ever found. Several mammoths, preserved in the permafrost, have been identified in Siberia but the DNA was degraded.
So how are they doing?
The Japanese scientists collected samples of bone marrow, muscle and skin from mammoth remains found in Siberia last August. Yesterday, after a year fighting Russian bureaucracy, the samples arrived.
The researchers face a series of new hurdles. First, they have to confirm the samples are from mammoths, then see if they can isolate a full set of chromosomes. Then they would have to fuse an egg from a living relative – an elephant – with DNA from an extinct creature. Then there would be the challenge of implanting the embryo into the womb of a host mother.
Doesn’t sound very much like “cloning” to me. And since this is the Guardian, no article about a creature that thrives in a cold climate would be complete without a gratuitous reference to global warming.
If they overcame all these challenges, they would then be faced with the biggest of all: what to do with a lonely ice age mammal in a rapidly warming world.
Oh for heavens sake. Go north. Use a fridge. Biggest challenge of all indeed.
And as to what to do with it, hasn’t the Guardian heard of show business? That’s what all this is about. This is not “pure” science, which pure science seldom is anyway. Think Jurassic Park. Think Elephant Man. Or in this case Elephant Mammoth.
While post-modern lefties and ultra-nationalists tend to regard each other as polar opposites they are, in fact, afflicted with an identical inability to see non-white people as actual human beings. In the case of the latter they are an amorphous bloc of exotic invaders to be feared and in the case of the former they are an amorphous bloc of exotic clients to be fawned over.
It is precisely this fawning tendency that informs organisations such as the BBC and it results in painfully facile attempts to ‘attract more viewers from ethnic minorities’; as if this outcome is dependent on doing something other than simply making good TV shows.
However, I am pleased to note that this drive to establish a TV Ghetto appears to have fallen flat on its face:
The BBC’s attempts to attract more viewers and listeners from ethnic minorities have been “disappointing” with audiences actually falling, the corporation’s governors admitted today.
Despite the launch of two new national digital radio stations aimed at ethnic minorities and increased representation on mainstream TV and radio, there was “little evidence” the drive has worked at all, the governors concluded in the BBC annual report for 2002-2003.
Good. I was tempted to add something along the lines of a hope that the BBC producers have learned a lesson but they probably haven’t. Since their revenue is guaranteed by the taxpayer they are immune from the harsh market discipline that other broadcasters have to endure when their audiences plummet. In fact, they may even conclude that the audience decline stems from a failure to pursue ‘ethnic minorities’ with sufficient zeal.
I have not seen any of the shows supposedly aimed at ‘ethnics’ but I am willing to wager that they were uniformly dreadful. No wonder viewers of all races are staying away in droves. People, whatever their racial origin, watch television to be entertained not patronised and humiliated.
Now call me a big kid, if you will, and Stephen Pollard certainly doesn’t pull any punches in his article, on the topic, but I used to really enjoy reading the Harry Potter novels, even in public, even on trains, and even in preference to Murray N. Rothbard economics textbooks. (No, I hear you cry, how can you say such a thing?) But not any more.
For me the magic is either dying, or has already died. And it seems I’m not alone, for a Booker-winning author, A S Byatt, has also just slated the latest tome. Which is a relief, because I thought it was just me. → Continue reading: Potter losing his magic?
My chum Julian, who is a prince amongst men, contrived to acquire me a copy of Lara Croft’s latest outing for the PC… Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. I have been very keen to see what could be done with this franchise now that all aspects of games technology have advanced so far.
Alas, although I am only about a third of the way through it so far, I am mightily unimpressed. The graphics are downright primitive: there is simply no excuse for representing tree branches and foliage with 2-D sprites these days. Character models are boringly drawn, lack detail and either do not lip-synch at all or do so very badly. Two female character in the part I have just finished use exactly the same face model, hands look like baseball gloves … if graphically speaking U2003 powered ‘Splinter Cell’ is the current state of the art, then Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is at least two years behind the curve. It is little more than a re-hash of the last Tomb Raider, which was looking tired even back then. The some of the graphics purporting to show the game on the Internet are misleading to put it mildly. If there is a way to get it to look that way I have yet to discover it. And yes, I am using a fairly high-end PC with a good graphics card and half a gig of RAM.
Additionally, the voice acting is flat, the controls are a f**king nightmare when attempting precise manoeuvres, camera control is dreadful and sometimes simply does not work at all, the story line is just a re-hash of all that went before it… in short, the whole bloody thing is un-engaging and frustrating.
To make matters worse, the program is buggy as hell, with entire documented features apparently unimplemented (I have yet to get ‘sprint’ to work no matter what key I map it to and unarmed combat does not seem to do much either). One character (a bartender) chats to Lara whilst appearing to be turned inside-out and all manner of graphic anomalies are scattered throughout the game, strongly suggesting extremely sloppy beta testing by the makers. I honestly cannot think of a single positive thing to say about this game.
I will probably complete the game regardless but if they had managed as much humour and snappy dialogue as someone did with the promotional stuff for the game, I might not be playing with gritted teeth.
Given that the ‘Lara Croft’ franchise is such a valuable property, if I was a shareholder with money invested in this I would be looking for boardroom-heads-on-spikes about now. I am very glad I got this game as a present but I would not recommend it to anyone. Save your pounds/bucks/euros etc. and wait for Half Life 2 and Deus Ex: Invisible War.
Sharon Stone is getting divorced. Not good news for Sharon but a significant chunk of the rest of the planet rejoices at the news she is ‘back on the market’.
45 years old and still hot
Update: As a commenter reminded me… “Consider that a divorce”
Some weeks ago I saw a clip of an old Bogart movie and it started me thinking about the type of film it represented. That old Raymond Chandler thing: dark streets, smoke filled rooms, double and triple crosses, collaborators shot in the night… I forgot about it until a few days ago when Kathryn Hepburn died. Her obituary mentioned the classic movie “African Queen”.
We are in a perfect age for the return of Film Noir. Imagine a Bogart-like character in Baghdad. Think of the plot possibilities! You’ve secret caches of billions in gold, diamonds and dollars. There are buried hordes of poison gas, anthrax and smallpox. We can stretch reality for Hollywood’s sake and toss in an operational nuke or two, soon to be sold to a high ranking al Qaeda.
The Russians didn’t hold a candle to the Nazi’s for pure evil. Films about them didn’t have that stark manichean good versus evil quality of the era surrounding WWII… or of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. You have perfect villains, with no redeeming human qualities, in the members of his inner circle.
The escaped Arch-Villain Saddam in his secret hideaways is the nearest thing to a Fu Manchu class villain we are ever likely to see in reality.
Here’s a starter for our Hollywood readers (and I know you are out there Brian).
Bogart, a grizzled US Army veteran working in civil reconstruction, becomes involved with a beautiful Iraqi woman. Her brother is under threat by the Saddam Fedaheen and she wants Bogie’s help in extricating him. Our hero gets drawn deeper and deeper into a dark plot that sees him wandering the streets of old parts of Baghdad at night, shots flashing in the night, the occasional dead bad guy….
We end up in a finale with Bogie trying to save the girl and stop the nasty utterly evil guys from doing their utterly dasterdly deed against total innocents.
This stuff would sell like hotcakes in the US right now.
As part of my continuing vow to be as nice as humanly conceivable towards our neighbours in France, I refer the readers of this blog to the following news item, purely for the purposes of conveying information, and not out of any desire to gloat over, denigrate or otherwise annoy the French.
Harry Potter has cast such a spell over the French that they are snapping up JK Rowling’s latest book in English, rather than waiting for the translation.
[…]
“It’s not exactly going to please the anti-globalisation movement,” noted literary magazine Livres Hebdo, which compiles and publishes the bestseller charts.
Heh. 
Usually when we feature pictures of posters in the London Underground the news is bad. But here is some good news, in the form of a poster advertising Steven Pinker‘s The Blank Slate.
The book itself probably doesn’t need much plugging here, but I’ll plug it anyway. It’s about true and false (as in the “Blank Slate” of the title) views of human nature, and about how they affect politics, education, aesthetics, and so on. Summarising brutally, if you think that human nature is something that a political system can simply shape at will, you’ll tend to say that your preferred political system should shape away, sometimes with murderous consequences.
To me the encouraging thing about this book is that here is a mainstream publishing event, so to speak, which is full almost to the point of saturation with references to the literature of liberty, of classical liberalism and of anti-collectivism. If you were a regular reader of the publications of, say, the Libertarian Alliance, or of the Reason Foundation, or of the Cato Institute, you’d find references to any number of debates and discussions and personalities which would ring bells with you. Among the many names, for example, listed in the References section are: Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, Kenneth Minogue, Ferdinand Mount, Wendy McElroy and Tom Wolfe, to name just a very few such. I suspect that the Reason foundation may deserve particular kudos for helping Pinker’s thinking along these lines.
When I first spotted this poster, there must have been quite a few of them around, but when, digital camera in hand, I went looking for it again yesterday, I had nearly given up when I found one still on view. Presumably this campaign was timed to coincide with this competition, for which The Blank Slate was shortlisted. (Pinker has been shortlisted for this prize three times, but has yet to win it.)
Since this is Samizdata, let me also mention that the lady in the poster to the left of the Pinker poster as we look at it is Eliza Dushku, star of the movie Wrong Turn. “A brutally exciting, savage shocker. Shriek, jump, enjoy!”
Ah, human nature.
Johnathan Pierce did a piece on Tuesday about this book by Tyler Cowen. And if you follow that link to amazon.co.uk you find that paragraph one of review number one goes like this:
A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist’s eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural “destruction” breeds not artistic demise but diversity.
So globalisation is good, culturally as well as economically. But the Saddam Hussein reference does rather make me want to rethink my attitude to My Way. This song may indeed be a hymn of praise to individualism and individual liberty, but Saddam Hussein wasn’t (and still isn’t?) averse to individualism and individual liberty – he was/is after all an extremely liberated individual – provided that it’s his individualism and individual liberty he’s singing about rather then anyone else’s. The “My Way” critics would appear to be vindicated.
But although bad news for anyone who thinks that only Hayekian liberals sing this song, this is not exactly good news for collectivists either, for when someone like Saddam sings this song, he is ramming home the lesson that collectivism, rather than installing any sort of collective virtue into power, merely ensures the triumph of all the vices of one vicious individual, who ends up doing everyone in, and doing it “my way”. You have to admit that the world’s nastiest despotisms devise their own uniquely ghastly ways of killing and torturing people.
And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain. …
Concerning Saddam, let’s hope so.
From what I have observed over the years, one of the things in the world that annoys lefties more than almost anything else in the world is a somewhat drunk and somewhat old guy singing My Way, the song made famous by Frank Sinatra.
The reason people sing it is because they understand freedom and what freedom is all about. The right to do things your way, your pride when you have, the fact that this will involve mistakes, but so what? That’s what the song is all about and we all know it.
And that’s why lefties hate it so. For them, it is the sound of defeat. It is the sound of people who have consciously and deliberately turned their backs on lefty bullshit and have decided to do things their way, as often as not with their own money.
Ask yourself this. How often do they get drunk and sing this song at NGO/tranzi conferences? Not often is my guess, or if so only with post-modern irony, which doesn’t count.
So, thanks to Dave Barry for linking to this story, which shows that in the Philippines people take this song seriously, just as people do everywhere else. Basically someone wasn’t singing the song very well, and was stabbed to death.
And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain. …
He sang more truly than he knew.
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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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