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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A while ago I wrote a posting here about how Stalin had maybe made Shostakovich a better composer. Deeper, less flippantly modernistical, more soulful, more significant, that kind of thing. In one way, Soviet repression certainly made Shostakovich preferable to me, because I dislike opera, that is to say, I dislike the sound that it makes. Political repression meant that Shostakovich wrote less opera and more instrumental music. There is no doubt that if Shostakovich had had his way, he would have felt safe enough to write more operas, and that would surely have meant fewer symphonies, concertos and string quartets. All of which I adore, except when the symphonies burst into song, as they did towards the end.
I just do not like the way that most classical music singing is done. All that wobbling and bellowing. This style was developed to fill opera houses before microphones, and during the pre-microphone era this was all that there was, if people were going to be able to hear it at the back of the hall. But now, when I compare the average din, so to speak, of this this style with the best of the twentieth century microphone-savvy singers, I find the operatic manner very off-putting and a serious barrier to my enjoyment of and understanding of classical music as a whole. See also this recent posting over at my personal blog about Sting doing a CD of some songs by John Dowland, which I of course welcome. Since writing that posting I have actually heard Sting sing Dowland in a broadcast concert. Frankly, I thought his voice sounded far too strained and I did not enjoy it. But many clearly did, and maybe the CD will sound better. Either way, the attempt was definitely worth making, and I hope other pop singers follow his lead. This concert can be listened to courtesy of the BBC for the next week or so.
Ironically, one of the things about the operatic style of singing that particularly annoys me is that even if you do know the language they are supposed to be singing in, you often cannot hear the damn words, and have to resort to reading along with a little book if you want to know what is being said, just as if it was in a foreign language. This drains much of the spontaneity out of the experience. But, even if I can hear the words, I still hate all the wobbling and bellowing. On the other hand, if there is little or no wobbling or bellowing I often love it, even if I cannot understand the foreign words. I just listen to the sound of it, as if the singing was a violin or something.
If you, on the other hand, like the way the typical opera singer sounds, then I am very happy for you. I am absolutely not arguing that you should make yourself suffer from my dislike of opera singing even if you now do not. Lucky you.
But meanwhile, I personally wish some way could have been contrived to have made Shostakovich’s great English compositional contemporary Benjamin Britten write more symphonies, concertos and string quartets, and fewer operas, without ruining the political culture of the country where he happened to be born and to live, which happens also to be mine. I love Britten’s concertos, symphonies and string quartets, such as they are. But almost anything of Britten’s involving singing, particularly solo singing (classical choral singing I find less annoying), especially if the solo singing is being done by Peter Pears, causes me to switch off. Ironically, had Britten lived half a century later than he did, he might have felt a lot more inhibited about expressing his true ideas, given that so many of them involved the fact that he loved beautiful boys! He might instead have written fewer operas and more string quartets, and critics might then have argued about the alleged paedophilic sub-text of said quartets. And I could have ignored all that and loved the music a whole lot more than I now love Britten’s operas.
Anyway, I now want to speculate that maybe this Shostakovich/Britten contrast can be generalised, to throw light on the bigger story of Western classical music. → Continue reading: Political repression and the development of Western classical music
I do not as yet know a great deal about this. It appears that some company has managed a court order requiring the domain name for spamhaus.org to be taken down.
Spamhaus.org are one of the better anti-spam sites and supply an excellent real time blocking list to anyone who wants it. Their service has been free and voluntary and much appreciated by many harried network system administrators, among whose ranks I have from time to time been included.
I know nothing about this ‘Ensight’ but I can think of no reason for a legal attack on the Spamhaus folk other than as a means of stopping the information about your current spam hosts from getting distributed to all those who voluntarily wish to block you.
Whether Ensight is or is not run by a bunch of spammers I do not know. If anyone has any more information on the events leading up to the court order, feel free to comment.
The European ‘social model’ is nearing the end of the road:
Jobless Germans could be forced to surrender anything but the cheapest of cars to keep their benefit payments flowing, if a plan by conservative politicians goes ahead.
The latest bid to make drawing Germany’s traditionally generous social benefits less attractive would see the long-term unemployed forced to shun high-end “Vorsprung Durch Technik” Audi convertibles, BMWs and Mercedes S Class cars for distinctly lesser models.
Those who live by the state will die by the state.
US blogger Jim Henley has some interesting thoughts about the politics of ace science fiction adventures series Battlestar Galactica. In my typically languid British way, I have just about started munching my way through series 2, which I find rather dark and depressing compared to the excellent series 1, but I am savouring the programmes even so, and looking forward to the third series, already now showing. My addiction to this series is worse even than Babylon 5 or, to roll back the years and to a very different genre, to Blackadder. The acting and the plots are consistently enthralling and entertaining.
It got me thinking about drama and storytelling more generally. If you tell a certain type of person that your favourite television show is Battlestar or Firefly, you are sometimes put in the ‘geek’ category, but it seems to me that in terms of quality and ability to describe the human condition, SF television shows can hold their own with the most pretentious dramas. In some ways, they are the final redoubts of romantic realism in drama.
Now, I wonder if that guy on the Tube was a Cylon…
[Editors note: for some previous thoughts on Battlestar Galactica on Samizdata, see here]
Via the excellent India Uncut, I reproduce this shortest – and most revealing – of short stories in its entirety:
He loaded all his belongings onto a truck and was driving to another town when he was waylaid by a mob. Eyeing the goods greedily, one man said to the other, ‘Just look at all that booty he is decamping with.’ The owner smiled proudly, ‘What you see here is my personal property.’
Some of the men laughed. ‘We know.’
There was a yell from the mob, ‘Don’t let this capitalist get away. He is nothing but a robber with a truck.’
It is a partition-era tale, but still remarkably relevant today – it has been institutionalised and multiplied across society.
There is nothing much these days, in the realm of public affairs, that excite me or provide any material degree of enthusiasm. Hence, I take my little nuggets of pleasure wherever I can find them. Occasionally, an exquisite irony will do.
Take the predictable storm over the comments of Jack Straw concerning the Islamic veil, the incidence of which is widepsread and growing on these shores. To my mind his observations are both fair and reasonable:
In his interview with the BBC’s Today programme, he said it is important in face-to-face meetings that both sides can see each other.
A plausible practical explanation. But what has much broader political impact is his belief that veils which cover the face are a “visible statement of separateness” that is “a barrier to social integration”.
Speaking for myself, I would go further. I find the veils (and particularly those black ‘tent-jobs’) rather sinister and creepy. That may not be the intention behind them but that is what they communicate to me and, while others may take a different view, I submit that not by any stretch of a sane mind could either Mr. Straw’s or my views be regarded as racist.
However, we do not live in sane times and, not a few nanoseconds after Mr. Straw’s words left his mouth, a whole troupe of the usual suspects were hopping up and down yodelling the ‘R’ word at the top of their lungs. Indeed, it took only a few hours Grievance Machine to get its gears in full spin:
The first sign of a racist reaction came in Liverpool on Friday when a man snatched a veil from a 49-year-old woman’s face after shouting racist abuse. Yesterday, protesters took to the streets of Mr Straw’s Blackburn constituency to vent their anger.
A ludicrous and hysterical response one might think, yet it is a response which has been nurtured, fostered and actively encouraged.
Seven years ago, and following on the recommendations of the Macpherson Report, the government instructed the police to adopt the recommendations into a formal set of guidelines which defined a ‘racist incident’ as:
“any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”
That interpreation is so wide as to amount to a form of administrative intimidation, designed to deter people from making the kind of remarks, even in private, which Mr. Straw has now made quite publicly. Surely the government of Western liberal democracy would insist on some degree of objectivity, no? Er, no:
In his Action Plan on the Report, the Home Secretary said that the Home Office would “ensure that the Inquiry’s simplified definition of a racist incident is universally adopted by the police, local government and other relevant agencies”.
And who was that Home Secretary? Yes, of course, it was the very same Mr. Jack Straw.
So here is some advice for you if you happen to be among the League of the Outraged: march yourself off to the nearest cop shop and report that you perceive Mr. Straw’s views as racist. The police are then obliged to record it as such. I doubt very much whether it would go any further than that but, who knows, word of it may just reach Mr. Straw.
If he not to be quite hoist by his own petard then, at least, his petard can be picked up and wielded like a wet fish to slap around his stupid head.
I knew early on I would not find ‘Death of a President‘ to my tastes, and now that I have heard the plot summary I know it for a certainty. Since most major US film outlets are not running it, I will spoil the plot for you for the movie few of you would have bothered to go see any way.
The black guy did it.
Yes, you heard right. The BBC decided to make the movie villain a black father who had lost his son in the Iraq War. Apparently most of the movie is about a rush to judgement of an innocent Arab-American.
The plot is wrong on so many levels I hardly know where to start. First, the BBC just does not get it. ‘Black Americans’ are Americans first and melanin enhanced second. They are as patriotic as any other Americans and perhaps more so.
What would be a realistic plot? If I were writing such a script, I would make the killer a Cindy Sheehan follower. There are loads of serious nutcases around – you can find hundreds of them on certain web sites – who no doubt day dream about doing something like this. The attempt on President Ford and the wounding of President Reagan were both done by fruitcakes. It is almost certain the biggest threat to George Bush would similarly be a nut. It is of course possible a nutjob presidential assassin wannabe could be black… but it would be a first in US history.
I think the people who created this movie are simply detestable.
Correction: It was not a BBC production. It was done by Gabriel Range and is to be or was shown on UTV Channel 4 in the UK as part of a series on the effects of the War on Terror
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
– Hubert H. Humphrey
Not everything left-liberals say is nonsense.
I have been keeping an eye on David Cameron’s videoblogging efforts since I was alerted to Webcameron by Thaddeus. It is providing an interesting depiction of the modern Conservative party. Take the entry where Cameron brags over the success of the recent Tory conference. He proudly declares
We had debates each day; should we ban advertising to children? Is it time to end cheap air travel? Are companies a force for good or not?
That Cameron thinks the first two questions are worth debating confirms he’s the statist grub most here labelled him long ago, but when the final ponderance was mooted, someone really should have jumped up and declared the affirmative answer beyond question, and if anyone wants to debate this further then here’s what they need to do to resign their membership of the party. Completely disregarding the outcome of this debate, I find it absolutely jaw-dropping that the Tories would hold a discussion over whether companies are a beneficial force in society. Unbelievable.
In the days before accurate timekeeping, determining your longitude was an extremely difficult task, requiring extremely accurate timekeeping. The British Admiralty expended enormous resources and considerable sums of money on the problem until it was solved by John Harrison in 1761. These days, we just turn on electronic devices and communicate with satellites.
This is particularly useful when, as this afternoon, one is in a place where one couldn’t possibly discover the longitude any other way.
The Royal Greenwich Observatory no longer exists as an institution, having been abolished in 1998 (after moving its last astronomical faclities away from Greenwich in 1957), and the observatory buildings are today part of the National Maritime Museum, which has its main facilities in the former Greenwich Hospital buildings at the bottom of the hill below the observatory. I provide a picture merely because the view is nice.
Alas, the statue at the top of the hill does not seem right. The statue is of General James Wolfe, who captured Quebec City for the British in 1754. Whilst I do not begrudge Gen. Wolfe his statue, it seems wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, why is the statue in pride of place in Greenwich, a place of great maritime heritage, a General rather than an Admiral. Secondly, given the history of the place, there is another figure who to me should be the man standing there. → Continue reading: Satellite navigation is a wonderful thing
“Purchaser shall not sell or transfer any Cat purchased hereunder to anyone other than an immediate family member, and shall not offer to any person the purchase of a Cat or any genetic material from a Cat, the rights Purchaser may have under this Agreement, or any other right related hereto, without the Company’s express written authorization.”
– An extract from the click through licence one is required to agree to when ordering a genetically modified hypoallergenic cat from a company named Allerca. (Via Boingboing).
Firefox users rejoice… at least those who use it via Windows XP… the push button formatting now works in the comment entry forms, but you will probably have to clear your browser cache first to notice any difference.
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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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