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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Even by the megalomaniac standards of modern Premiership soccer, this allegation, if true about former Chelsea player William Gallas, is astonishing:
Chelsea say they sold William Gallas because he threatened to score an own goal if he was selected for their first game of the season.
The Stamford Bridge club have released a statement explaining their reasons for allowing the French defender to join Arsenal on transfer deadline day.
Gallas, 29, allegedly refused to play again for the Blues.
Chelsea claim he said he would score an own goal if he was forced to play against Manchester City on 20 August.
This story has had the amazing effect of making me feel a tincture of sympathy for the charmless Chelsea football manager, Jose Mourinho.
The market for footballers and other sports remains a strange one. Footballers have, in the space of under 50 years, gone from the position of being treated almost like serfs with capped wages to swaggering characters thinking they are able to command whatever salaries they want, on any terms. But I suspect that this process is hitting the buffers. There has been a great boom in professional soccer and the surrounding business over the past two decades but one suspects that that has now reached a sort of plateau
Football has to compete with other forms of entertainment. The less-than-stellar performance of England in the World Cup, coupled with lingering sourness and the antics of certain players, may have sated the public appetite for shelling out vast sums for a season ticket to a game. And when a player becomes so deluded about his importance to a club that he actually threatens to damage it by scoring own goals and so on, then he has to be pushed out. Chelsea had no alternative. if this guy had been a bond dealer at a bank and had threatened to hurt the company if it failed to do what he wanted, that person would probably be sued to an inch of his life.
The creation of a super-democratic body created by central government called the Standards Board for England, which can exclude members of a local council who were elected on a specific issue platform because ‘their minds are already made up’ has been described in the Telegraph as ‘hampering democracy’. This is rather like saying having your head cut off ‘hampers thinking’… true but more than a tad misleading. British understatement is alive and well it seems.
The Standards Board’s function is to prevent single issue politics by simply disallowing a ‘difficult’ elected councillor from doing what they were elected to do so ‘hampering’ democracy is not an unintended consequence, it is what the Standards Board for England does.
Face it, the whole point of the Standards Board of England is to prevent councillors who are elected on the basis of views unpopular with the establishment from being allowed to disrupt business as usual by asking difficult questions and proving resistant to being pressured by established political groupings.
So let us call the Standard Board for England and their network of ‘ethical standards officers’ what they actually are: Commissars.
Yours truly got a mention in a whimsical New York Times article by William Safire in which he makes the point that “coiners can’t be choosers”… once an epithet, in this case Moonbat, escapes into the general meme-pool, the coiner has no control over how it actually gets used.
I don’t find taking my clothes off difficult, it’s the acting that’s really hard!
– so said Elena, who is a thespian, last night after dinner at Samizdata HQ
The solution to envy is not to tax the rich but to tax the envious…It’s envy which imposes an externality on the rich. Make the envious pay for their ugly preferences.
– Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution fame.
On the whole, I am not a huge fan of using taxation to eradicate any kind of human behaviour, irrespective of whether it is levied upon the rich or the envious. And this is obviously a frivolous prescription. However, I like the quote for two reasons. Not only is it a worthy inversion of the status quo; it also spots the principal (yet unspoken) justification for our “progressive” taxation structures in the minds of statists – envy.
Steve Edwards relates an interesting story unfolding in the Chinese blogosphere:
Chinese Internet vigilantes have launched a hunt for a self-professed British bounder who has sparked outrage by blogging about his seduction of women in Shanghai. The campaign to uncover the identity of the blogger and have him kicked out of China is the latest in a series of online denunciations that have drawn comparisons with the humiliations inflicted by mobs during the Cultural Revolution.
Traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog [currently restricted to members only – JW] had surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners.
That some Chinese men are haunted by a sense of sexual inadequacy should come as no surprise – it is a trait that can be uncovered universally. However, there seems a particularly ‘Chinese’ way of expressing this, combining a sense of wounded pride, chauvinism and sexual frustration. I recall similar goings on a few years ago when a young Chinese female author wrote a scandalous (by Chinese standards) book that was subsequently banned. The protagonist, a Chinese teenage girl, got up to all kinds of naughtiness. In the most infamous scene, she has sex with a German in a public bathroom, stating something like “riding his big cock was like sitting on a fire hose”. Such explicit prose brought forth a torrent of outraged letters to the author and messages posted on bulletin boards. Most of them were deeply offended by the sexual encounter with the foreigner, and many threatened sexual violence involving the respondent’s own (presumably fictitious) monster appendage.
The ugly controversy these isolated tales of sexual licence generate obscures – yet also confirms – the fact that generally, Chinese women are probably the most sexually conservative in East Asia. Despite its ostensible headlong rush to modernise and embrace the rest of the world (not an entirely apt metaphor, considering my forthcoming conclusion), such controversies show that much of Chinese society harbours a visceral discomfort with the consequences of throwing open the gates to Johnny Foreigner. This evidently includes large elements of the net-savvy middle class; a demographic that usually has progressive views ascribed to it. Socially, China is still quite an illiberal society, despite the adoption of many Western values. Foreign workers in a city like Shanghai can lose sight of this in the familiar surroundings of expensive consumer goods, rows of the steel and glass churches of capitalism and a general will to party like it’s 1999 amongst the city’s elite and emerging elite. Nevertheless, as this story confirms, conflating the two cultures can still be dangerous; even in the midst of China’s latest Cultural Revolution.
My team, The Royal Philharmonic, are facing relegation after our key bassoonist was hit by a hamstring injury, and we had to play Terry Butcher on the kazoo.
– Harry Hutton responds to The Times publishing a “league table for British orchestras”.
At least 14 people were arrested on Friday night in south London as part of an anti-terror operation by police. Developing…
If laid end to end, I wonder how far the column inches about the recent war in Lebanon would extend? Would they stretch right around the earth? Would they extend to the moon and back? Perhaps they would only reach as far as Sudan:
Two years ago, the then American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that the killings in Darfur constituted genocide.
Since then, the number of deaths through violence, starvation and disease in Sudan’s western region has risen to at least 300,000, and of those displaced to about two million.
Despite the fact that genocide is a crime under international law, both the African Union and the United Nations have proved powerless to stop it.
Notwithstanding these horrifying statistics (which dwarf even the most overwrought claims about Lebanon), the response of the “world community” is very close to pin-drop silence. Apart from the occasional bloodless and anodyne article (such as the one linked to above) the MSM could not seem to care less. Where are the lurid photographs of dead Sudanese babies? Where are the demonstrations by “anti-war campaigners”? Where are the human shields? Where are the demands for a ceasefire? Where are the calls for a change of foreign policy? Where are the Nazi Germany comparisons? Where are the..ahem..’intrepid’ Western reporters with cry-me-a-river expressions on their faces? Where are the Church groups organising boycotts?
The answer is the same in all cases and there are no prizes for getting it right. No, the real question is why? Why the ocean of indifference to a sustained programme of mass murder and ethnic cleansing that is, by modern standards (and perhaps by any standards) horrific? It seems that the plight of impoverished Africans is enough to precipitate an avalanche of rock concerts and celebrity blubbing while hundreds of thousands of murdered Africans causes not even the thinnest batsqueak of protest.
I am just speculating here, naturally, but could this conspiracy of silence have something to do with the fact that the perpetrators of this real atrocity are Arab Muslims? Depressingly enough, I think the answer is yes. If even the Telegraph article I have linked to above is too timid to actually identify the aggressors (preferring instead the safe and neutral term ‘rebels’) then claims of ignorance or laziness simply will not do. I don’t imagine there would be quite this level of caginess if it was the Israelis who were laying waste to Darfur.
In my opinion, Darfur is kept off the radar screen because it is too embarrassing for the bien pensent. Having adopted the narrative of Arabs/Muslims as victims of oppression they are pretty much obliged to ignore or dismiss any evidence that might undermine that view (such is the mental paralysis induced by narrative). Besides, Africans living in the West seem disinclined to blow up airliners, so there is no need to waste precious air-time deliberating about the ‘root causes’ of their anger.
The horrors of Darfur cannot be excused by reference to Israeli or American ‘occupation’ and so it is locked away in the attic like a mad relative. Yes, it is ugly and unfair but at least we know for sure that there is not one single shred of decency or honesty in the entire (and preposterously misnamed) anti-war movement.
One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it.
– From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb.
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that a remake of the classic, and creepy UK film, The Wicker Man, was coming out. We seem to have a lot of remakes at the moment, prompting thoughts that Hollywood has run dry on creative ideas. I sympathise up to a point with this. The remake of the old Michael Caine/Noel Coward caper, the Italian Job, was an amusing piece of film but not a patch on the original. Flight of the Phoenix was good, but not as good as the original, etc. And yet and yet….the Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo and Denis Leary, was excellent, in fact an improvement in certain ways on the original, which starred the great Steve McQueen.
I suspect the problem is that when we first see a film, or read a novel, we intend to invest a certain amount emotionally in the experience if is a good one. I can imagine the howls of outrage if someone tries to remake Casablanca, or the African Queen, say. One of the problems of course is that remakes can remove elements deemed politically incorrect. The original Italian Job, for example, took a poke at the older incarnation of the EU, known at the time as the Common Market; it also made fun of Italian crooks and security services, while it also celebrated a sort of camp Britishness and had the wonderful character, Professer Peach, as played by Benny Hill (his character had a penchant for very large women).
Even so, I resist the urge if I can to get snooty about remakes. Peter Jackson, the maestro behind Lord of the Rings, is planning to bring out a new version of the classic war movie, The Dambusters, using modern computer technology to portray how 617 Squadron breached a number of German dams during the war. Jackson is no PC bore and seems determined to pay his respects to the heroisim of the RAF. I am definitely looking forward to the film when it comes out.
In the original movie, the RAF leader Guy Gibson has a black labrador, called Nigger. I will be interested to know if that rather un-PC fact is airbrushed out. Also, it being the 1940s, most of the aircrew should smoke cigarettes like chimneys. Will they be forced to stub out the habit to preserve the sensibilities of 21st Century viewers?
Well shall see.
Robert Bidinotto has an interesting article up discussing the admission in the Washington Post that their reporting on the matter of former CIA agent Valerie Plame and former US ambassador Joe Wilson was completely wrong.
Buried in this editorial is the fact with the most far-reaching implications: that Joe Wilson falsely claimed that he had “debunked” White House charges that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium in Niger. It turns out that Saddam had been trying to buy uranium, so that Iraq could build nuclear weapons.
Thus, it turns out that the White House stands vindicated on one of its key arguments for going to war against Saddam: that this thug and his regime were actively pursuing a WMD program. So…where are all the headlines about this? Except for this editorial admission by the Post (which implies that the newspaper had been taken in, rather than played a key roll in disseminating the lies), where are the media mea culpas, retractions, and apologies for many months of false, anti-Bush “conspiracy” stories? Don’t hold your breath.
I must confess when I quickly zipped through the specific WaPo article mentioned earlier today, I paid more attention to the Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson aspects of this saga and not really pick up on what I now realise was the ‘bombshell’ aspect to all of this: it seems that Saddam really was shopping for uranium in Niger.
Interesting.
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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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